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Saturday, March 12, 2016

The Reboot

The Lost Tribes lives again. The scope and nature of the game is going to change. Name is subject to change but I don't know right now.

Background

In the previous game there was a focus on ship and engine creation and it relied on the player discovering engines and technology that enabled the player to do things. However, it became apparent that the player had no real chance of discovering parts of the underlying physics without understanding the grander physical model. Classic chicken and egg problem. Every solution I could think of that would help the player; defeated the purpose of the game which was the discovery of the engine and technology.

I set the game aside and then only recently have I decided that there is still something in this game, at least in the premise, even if the technology were known at the start.

The Reboot

This game starts with your civilization devastated by an alien attack. Your peons live, but your infrastructure is destroyed, and so you must pick up the pieces, repopulate and move on.

In the reboot, the game will have technology, but there is no technology tree; no research A to discover B; kind of mechanic. All technologies are known at the start, making the game more about strategy. What technology do you build to defend against an opponent? Initially there is no opponent. The game will involve two distinct development phases; Construction and Combat.

Construction is all about the organization of resources to defend the planet against your foe. Combat is all about the attack and destruction of that foe.

Some Initial Ideas

The game will be a 3D planar game. This means the player can see 3D objects, but those objects work on a 2D surface, no "digging in the ground", etc.

Planets are back and I'll be doing work on minerals/materials side in generated planets. Each planet has tectonic plates, referred to as regions which will be similar to continents. At each point on a planet, the player can put in a complex. A complex is akin to a city and each complex can have 1 or more buildings. Buildings are interconnected within the complex, so there is no need to design subways or roads, as they are implied, but between complexes, there are rail lines. Rail lines aren't fixed to the ground, they are more like air planes that fly along the ground, so no infrastructure needs to be built to connect two complexes.

Buildings can be connected to orbital locations using launch lines. And planets are connected using sublight orbital lines to connect planets within a system, or fly outside of a system. Finally solar systems are connected using stellar lines. However, there is only one kind of transport per type, so to go from one complex on one planet to another complex in a different system means complex -> orbit -> system -> orbit -> complex, with transfer points of material at exchange points.

Since the planet maker has already been developed, I'll simply evolve it for this iteration of the game.